106Rocky Mountain Review with interesting results, as when he compares Wakefield's interest in TV soap operas to his fiction, or McGuane's novels to his sporting journalism. For all the strengths of its conception, however, The New American Novel of Manners is something of a disappointment in practice. Though Klinkowitz's choice of authors is interesting, it is not clear why he has narrowed the field so drastically. A subject as broad as the contemporary American novel of manners obviously takes in a considerable range of writers, some of whom might have greater claims on our attention than Yates, Wakefield, and McGuane. Surely Bellow, Cheever, Updike, and Roth are as much "novelists of manners" as the three men discussed here. The definition of "manners" in this study is a problem. Klinkowitz assimilates all sorts of social phenomena to this category: styles of speaking, dressing, writing, sexual choices, modes of rebellion. After a while one begins to wonder if there is anything in any story of human affairs that would not be an instance of "manners." The root of the trouble is the absence of a theory of American manners. The looseness of Klinkowitz's analysis contrasts strongly with more incisive discussions of the subject, for instance Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide to the American Status System. Fussell's distinctions between "high" and "low" manners may be artificial and even offensive, but they lead to a much better understanding of the way we read social signs. There is a similar looseness in Klinkowitz's use of Barthes' concept of the sign. In Mythologies Barthes explains that the sign is a construct representing the relationship between the signified and the signifier. The sign exists not in the world of objects but in the consciousness (and to some extent the language) of the beholder. Klinkowitz gives only cursory attention to the business of interpretation or "textualization " whereby one can see a set of manners as a true "sign system." Though he occasionally speaks of characters as "readers" of manners (McGuane's Lucien Taylor, for instance), he does not say very much about what their "readings" entail. What is the scheme or context of these readings? What relationship do their interpretations of manners bear to systems of value or ideology? These questions go largely unanswered. The New American Novel ofManners presents an original and intelligent thesis, one which could generate any number of valuable insights into postwar American fiction. Unfortunately, the limited scope of the study and its neglect of basic theoretical problems keep it from realizing its potential. STUART MOULTHROP Yale University JAMES H. MAGUIRE, ed. The Literature oj Idaho: An Anthology: Boise: Boise State University Hemingway Western Studies, 1986. 336 p. Comes now out of Boise — abode of the Rocky Mountain Review — another manifestation of the "Idaho Renaissance": James H. Maguire's The Literature of Idaho. Co-editor of the Boise State University popular Western Writers Series pamphlets and former president of the Western Literature Association, Maguire is Book Reviews107 also an authority on western drama and a regional editor of the forthcoming Literary History of the American West. His compact 250,000-word paperback by literary Idahoans and non-Idahoans about Idaho and Idahoans ranges from early Indian oral narratives to contemporary essays, poems, stories, and novels. Between these two sections of the ancient and the avant-garde, Maguire's collection contains four sections on exploration narratives; tales of cowboys, pioneers, and the Nez Perce War; desert romances, mining tragedies, Utopian dreams, hunting stories, and disaster articles; and poetry, drama, and fiction of the boom-and-bust era. To each of these six sections and to each of his scores of literary selections the editor adds introductions . To each of these he appends a list of further readings. In addition, the anthology includes a general bibliography, more than two dozen illustrations and photographs, and a literary map of Idaho. Here is genius loci's plenty. For his special purpose, Maguire simply defines literature as "writing that lasts and generally receives more praise than other writing" (iii). From the bulk of Idaho literary expression he offers a hefty sampling of what he conceives as the most representative, significant, and interesting...
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Jan 1, 2002
Robert West 
Open Access